The Irish playwright Brendan Behan, known for his plays The Hostage and The Quare Fellow and for his memoir Borstal Boy, was a raucous, charismatic, hard-drinking Irish Republican who began to write after he got out of prison for shooting at English detectives during a public event.

ASP's Henry IV, Part I The work of Actors' Shakespeare Project is generally smart and imaginative, so the company's thoroughly misbegotten Henry IV, Part I , the first half of ASP's The Coveted Crown (at Midway Studios through November 21), comes as a surprise.

All aboard for this smooth ride Bus Stop is hardly a neglected masterpiece, or even William Inge's best play (that would be Picnic ), but when you watch Nicholas Martin's production, the Huntington's season opener (at the Boston University Theatre through October 17), you understand why it was a hit on Broadway in 1955.

Johnny Baseball is stuck in the minors The high point of Johnny Baseball , the new musical receiving its world premiere from the American Repertory Theater (at the Loeb Drama Center through June 27), comes two-thirds of the way through the second act.

Mostly high points at the Harvard Film Archive Vittorio De Sica, the subject of a major retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive, "Vittorio De Sica — Neo-Realism, Melodrama, Fantasy," was a movie star in Italy before he became a filmmaker.

And mostly masterpieces, at the Museum of Fine Arts, June 2-13.
The definition of film noir has become elastic through the years. Of the five movies included in the MFA’s series “Rialto’s Best of British Film Noir” only two, strictly speaking, are noirs: Brighton Rock, Graham Greene & Terence Rattigan’s adaptation of Greene’s novel, and The Third Man, Greene’s most famous collaboration with the filmmaker Carol Reed.

Lions in winter: a Tolstoyan feast Traversing the spectrum from farce to tragedy, Michael Hoffman's magnificent The Last Station suggests what the story of Count Leo Tolstoy's final days would look like if Chekhov had told it.

'Celebrating Chekhov' at the Museum of Fine Arts Given that every theater season seems to bring a new production of a Chekhov play, it's surprising that so few movies have been made of his dramas, or of his short stories. Or maybe not so surprising: Chekhov is perilously difficult for filmmakers.

Sleep No More brings Macbeth to Brookline Sleep No More , the second entry in the American Repertory Theater’s mini-season of revisionist Shakespeare, is the least orthodox production of Macbeth you’re likely to see. In fact, it’s linked to Macbeth as much by poetic allusion as by narrative — which is to say that it’s a little of both.

Kiss Me, Kate at the Lyric With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.